Opinion polls, surveys, focus groups and other approaches are used in all areas of public interest, to identify how people perceive certain topics in various domains, from politics and economics to sports and entertainment. For example, political analysts use opinion polls to learn voters' opinions about politicians, the economy, legislation, and the like. Marketing agencies conduct interest groups and surveys to learn shoppers' opinions on products and services from one or more manufacturers.
In particular, vendors that spend huge amount of resources in building brand names and making them popular are interested in understanding how people perceive their brand names and associated products. People interested in analyzing how people perceive certain topics are also interested in knowing how the perception of people varies by demographic parameters such as age, gender, race, or geographic region. For example, information such as, how a product is received in the market, how the popularity of a product varies by geographical regions or demographics, all is useful to informing the vendor about the public's perception of the brand. Conventional mechanisms to obtain this type of information include surveys and focus groups.
Information obtained through surveys has several drawbacks. For example, it is difficult to get information from people who are too busy to respond to surveys although their feedback may be valuable. Surveys have predetermined questions that may already be biased by the opinions of designers of the survey. The context in which a person fills a survey is not the most natural setting for a person. For example, sometimes people are given incentives to fill out surveys, and people may be more interested in the incentive rather than presenting an honest opinion in the survey. Typically surveys provide a section for providing general comments in free-form text, but a person needs time and creativity to express their opinions clearly in such a section. Also, if a large number of surveys are collected, the surveyor is faced with the task of analyzing a large amount of free-form text to find the key information of interest.
Focus groups are another way vendors obtain information about their brands. However, focus groups are expensive to conduct, and by their nature are limited to a relatively small number of participants, dozens, perhaps hundreds. While attempts can be made to ensure that the focus group participants are representative of a target population at large, the resulting information is still not necessarily reflective of the actual perceptions of people in the general population. One reason for this is that like surveys, focus groups are by their nature highly controlled environments, and so the discussions and opinions of the individuals may reflect biases introduced by the questions presented to the focus group, or biases from the participants who are obtaining some form of compensation to participate.